Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998 - Performing Arts - 343 pages
Ricky Jay is one of the world's great sleight-of-hand artists. He is also a most unusual and talented scholar, specializing in the bizarre, exotic, and fantastic side of the human species. The youngest magician to have appeared on television, Jay has become well known for his astonishing stage show as well as for his cameos in such movies as Glengarry Glen Ross and, most recently, Boogie Nights.

Jay's unparalleled collection of books, posters, photographs, programs, broadsides, and, most important, data about unjustifiably forgotten entertainers all over the world made this unique book possible. An investigation into the inspired world of sideshows, circuses, and singularly talented performers, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women is history of the most unusual -- and irresistible -- sort.

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About the author (1998)

Ricky Jay was born Richard Jay Potash in Brooklyn, New York in 1948. He first performed magic in public at the age of 4. At the age of 7, he appeared on a television show called Time for Pets, plopping a guinea pig into a top hat and appearing to turn it into a chicken. He left home as a teenager and worked at Lake George and at the Electric Circus. He appeared in about 40 movies and television shows including House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Redbelt, State and Main, Tomorrow Never Dies, Boogie Nights, and Deadwood. In the 1990s, he and Michael Weber founded the consulting firm Deceptive Practices. Their film-industry projects included a wheelchair that made Gary Sinise's Vietnam War-veteran character in Forrest Gump appear to be a double amputee. Jay wrote several books including Cards as Weapons, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, Celebrations of Curious Characters, and Matthias Buchinger: The Greatest German Living. He died on November 24, 2018 at the age of 70.

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